Make time to ignore them...

I have a theory about solving problems that I have seen work so often that I am willing to call it a LAW...

When I was a graduate student a group of us would get together a few times a week to work on studying the problems out professors gave us. We would often hit brick walls and not be able to continue... we would often agree to take a 10 minute break and when we came back one of us would know a way around that brick wall...

As a graduate student doing research I often ran into problems that I felt had an answer just beyond reach... at first I would just pound away at the problem- trying to solve it- spending hours driving my thinking deeper and deeper into a rut... Then I noticed that the solution to problems like that usually came when I finally gave up and took a while off from thinking about it.

Often when I had an experiment with a problem I would work hard to solve the problem... pounding away, getting all the data I could on the problem and then trying likely solutions... when that approach didnt work I learned to identify when my thoughts were getting into a rut... further continued thought would only serve to deepen that rut. I started forcing myself to abandon a problem for at least a few minutes and do something unrelated.

When I was a graduate student I would go take a short walk, watch the squirrels forage for food, watch the pattern of bees coming and going from a beehive, have a smoke... Always during my 'goofing off' my thoughts would drift back to the problem at hand, but then I was out of the mental rut... I would approach the problem from a new direction, and very often the solution would just pop up... usually it was obvious once my mind was out of the rut.

Since then I have made taking time off when confronting tough problems part of my problem solving routine. I think I can honestly say that the majority of the time I hit a problem that I can't solve that taking 10-20 minutes to ignore it leads me to the solution.

There was an excellent example of this just last week... I had a problem with my system that looked terribly critical...

I collected all the data I could and started coming to the conclusion that I had to do something that had a very high risk of damaging the system more... I was able to recognize that my mind was getting into a rut, so I stopped working and went outside to just walk around. I just walked around and enjoyed the view, thinking about nothing in particular- once I felt my mind leave the rut I started thinking about the problem again, starting with the data I had collected in trying to diagnose it. The true cause of the problem all of a sudden became clear.

I went back in and was able to fix the problem in 15 minutes, when, if I had kept banging my head against the brick wall, I at best would have spent hours accomplished nothing, and at worst done the wrong thing and made the problem worse.

I honestly believe that good problem solvers master the art of ignoring a problem in the right way. The key is instinctively knowing when you are running your thought processes into a rut.

I honestly believe that companies that freely let their technical or research employees take time off during work to just walk around or 'goof off' in other ways will see significant gains in productivity.

ALL the ideas I have had that were considered as 'really creative and useful' occurred to me when I was 'goofing off'. One of my current problem solving techniques is to walk out into the backyard of my office building and watch spiders spin their webs, and study the flowers on the bushes. I think about how such complexity can arise from such simple things... I have gained insights on the tricks a spider uses to organize its complex behavior... For instance the way it moves when spinning a web, or what sort of vibration in its web stimulates the spider to attack... (a constant or slow vibration applied with a finger is ignored by the spider, but the vibration of a small leaf placed in the web fluttering rapidly in the wind gets the spider to attack instantly, sort of a frequency filter)

but always my thoughts drift back to the problem at hand, and more often than not the solution presents itself...

This is, yet again, one of my long rambling posts, but I am posting right now to get my mind off another problem so I can think about it better later...

Feedback on problem solving is appreciated...